Dinah, ClinkShrink, & Roy produce Shrink Rap: a blog by Psychiatrists for Psychiatrists. A place to talk; no one has to listen.
All patient vignettes are confabulated; the psychiatrists, however, are mostly real.
--Topics include psychotherapy, humor, depression, bipolar, anxiety, schizophrenia, medications, ethics, psychopharmacology, forensic and correctional psychiatry, psychology, mental health, chocolate, and emotional support ducks. Don't ask. (It's not Shrink Wrap.)

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

When I told a told a friend (ah, Clinkshrink) I was going to start a blog, she said,"Your patients will read it!" Is this a problem? My first thought was: I have a novel out there that opens with a mental health professional stumbling upon her cross-dressed husband, how much worse can it get? True, most of my patients haven't stumbled upon my novel, and so far, none of those who've read it have fired me. It's a funny issue though, being a psychiatrist, trying to maintain some neutrality for the patients-- I'm not a psychoanalyst, but I do keep things fairly neutral both because I think my personal affairs would be a distraction in therapy, and because I want my privacy. There are no pictures of my family displayed, and so far the most self-revealing thing I've done is to put a Red Sox cap on the table in my waiting room the morning after they won the World Series.

On the other hand, being a writer is a somewhat public event, at least in brief spurts. Google has changed everything, and some of it beyond my control. I've googled me (as have some of my patients) and I'm in a bunch of places, including tied to a faith-based site called Psycho-babble run by Dr. Bob--- It's not me, but another EM, there are a few of us out there. I'm trying to figure out how to be the EM's who's listed in Who's Who in London. So, I guess my patients can unearth what they want, and I will admit to the Red Sox fan stuff, even the novel with a transvestite, and the Op-Ed rant about Malpractice Reform. Still not certain what I'll write about here, I don't plan to talk about my patients in a disrespectful, disparaging, or revealing way.

Finally, I'm left with the question of Is This Wise? for vague reasons...perhaps even Is This Safe? Other doctors seem to vary with how identifiable they are on the Web, and I haven't found another psychiatrist blog that isn't anonymous. Maybe there's a reason, maybe I'm missing something here, and should mask my identity. Tell me what you think...

1 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Enjoyed your blog… I’ll keep my eye on it. Regarding the ability of patients to access things you’ve written, and how this might affect psychotherapy, this is really uncharted territory. We each may have opinions about the ways this is the same or different than other forms of disclosure or transparency. However, regardless of my personal guess or assumption, this is a new phenomenon of a new age – only actual observation will give truly valid conclusions. So, you done it already – let’s see if it is beneficial, harmful, or neither